| This document is an attempt to define metrics quantifying the degree of privacy provided by a bitcoin transaction. | |
| Objectives | |
| Definition of metrics measuring the resistance of a transaction to a set of attacks against users privacy. | |
| Attacks considered in the scope of these metrics are: | |
| - Merged Inputs Heuristic: methods identifying the inputs controlled by a same entity | |
| - Coinjoin Sudoku: methods identifying the links existing between the inputs and outputs of a transaction |
(This is still a work-in-progress)
As of 2019-04-02 the following PR is has been merged into master which implements channel backups
See also https://twitter.com/alexbosworth/status/1112857863393763329
SCB has been merged into the lnd master branch:
lightningnetwork/lnd#2313 …
It allows for a small backup file to be made to recover a
data-lost channel's funds with peer cooperation. The file
25/5/2020
Imagine a future where a user Alice has bitcoins and wants to send them with maximal privacy, so she creates a special kind of transaction. For anyone looking at the blockchain her transaction appears completely normal with her coins seemingly going from address A to address B. But in reality her coins end up in address Z which is entirely unconnected to either A or B.
Now imagine another user, Carol, who isn't too bothered by privacy and sends her bitcoin using a regular wallet which exists today. But because Carol's transaction looks exactly the same as Alice's, anybody analyzing the blockchain must now deal with the possibility that Carol's transaction actually sent her coins to a totally unconnected address. So Carol's privacy is improved even though she didn't change her behaviour, and perhaps had never even heard of this software.
